The anti-pattern / co-option of devops as a role is almost entirely overlapping with companies undergoing digital transformations and advised by some CIO magazine, Big Four, or Gartner team that it’s important for said transformation. Because the cultural transformation in itself is already being branded as something new and idiosyncratic to the company the term “devops” as the cultural change itself is dropped to avoid confusion.

In most large non-tech companies operations is a cost center budgeted alongside facilities and basic costs of business and also usually run by managers less frequently with a software background as much as an IT or traditional business background focused around cost efficiencies. I’m not sure whether this designation or Taylorism is fundamentally the root causes for why “devops” from the cultural sense is not really happening.

> Troubleshooting a working, in-motion system requires a different set of skills, in my experience, from writing and debugging code

I'm not convinced of this - or rather, if someone can't troubleshoot a system in motion, they're going to struggle to actually develop anything substantial. Debugging is a very underestimated skill of programming.

I think the conflation of "devops" is nothing to do with skills and everything to do with culture. When you have them as separate business units or teams it becomes adversarial: every deployment is a potential headache for Ops, so Ops try to prevent deployments or set up staging barriers to minimise this. Whereas developers may not appreciate the difficulties involved in deploying a large system vs the toy one they're developing on.

There are countless definitions of devops around, but a developer that also does the ops part is one of the worst.

Devops can also mean that you're developing automation to reduce manual maintenance or even remove some ops responsibilities entirely.

Think of self healing clusters, auto provisioning and so on.

I've also come across the the definition of devops as a traditional ops dude that just worked for the dev team, keeping their development environment maintained. I'm still confused why they called that a devops position...

Heh are you me? I too have the same problem with "DevOps" - I prefer to evangelise it as a culture of Developers and Operations/Engineering being able to work closely and collaboratively - two departments that have historically been at each others throats, with a mentality of "toss it over the wall and forget about it"

I'd love to get into this kind of work (currently in webdev, but I'm a good debugger). My contact details are in my profile - can we chat?